Obsidian Entertainment has released a new early development blog post focusing on the creation of its upcoming Project Eternity RPG. The post covers issues related to armor design, as well as information about fulfillment of pledges to its recently successful Kickstarter drive.

Drawing on classics of the genre such as Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment, Project Eternity will feature character creation, a party of adventurers, tactical "real time with pause" combat, dungeon exploration, and a storyline the developers promise will be compelling.

What does this mean for Project Eternity? It means designing a new armor system that rectifies deficiencies of older systems while maintaining a familiar feel is tricky. Additionally, the more dissimilar the armor relationships are to those found in A/D&D, the more they will be re-evaluated for verisimilitude (i.e. "realism").

We would like our armor system to accomplish the following goals:

Make wearing different types of armor a real choice for the player based on both character build and circumstance. E.g. a swashbuckling lightly-armored fighter will tend to wear one of a variety of light armor types (maybe a gambeson or leather cuirass), but in a circumstance where protection is of utmost importance, the player may still choose to wear heavy armor with a loss in build optimization.

Disassociate armor value from class type in favor of different build types. E.g. a wizard can wear heavy armor and be a different type of wizard instead of just "a wizard who is bad".

Allow a character to maintain a character concept throughout the game without suffering extreme mechanical penalties. E.g. a character who starts the game in some form of light armor can complete the game in some form of light armor with appropriate gameplay trade-offs compared to wearing heavy armor.

Introduce new or upgraded armor types throughout the game instead of using ++ versions (which in itself would pose problems unless we directly duplicated A/D&D's d20-based attack mechanics).

Even with these three goals, there are a number of problems to solve. One of the biggest questions is how to break up and "advance" armor by type.